Lapham’s Quarterly

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

I think heaven will not be as good as earth, unless it bring with it that sweet power to remember, which is the staple of heaven here.

He who is afraid of his own memories is cowardly, really cowardly.

I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.

Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time.

Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.

Some memories are like lucky charms, talismans, one shouldn’t tell about them or they’ll lose their power.

Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.

Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.

I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.

A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.

Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

Anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being that is being, listening, and hearing is never repetition.

Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.

History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the level of the lower animals.

Anyone who in discussion quotes authority uses his memory rather than his intellect.

Memory is necessary for all operations of reasoning.

Time robs us of all, even of memory.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain way of thinking of nothing else.

What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

Memory is more indelible than ink.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Pictures made in childhood are painted in bright hues.

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.